Sunday Message, June 21.2026. The Holy Spirit Brings God's Word to My Mind
Opening
Today is the fourth Sunday after Pentecost. If you look at the church calendar, the season of Pentecost stretches all the way out to twenty-seven weeks, which tells you something about how weighty this event really is.
Where are we situated, then, in the larger story of Scripture? We are living past the book of Acts, past the letter to the Romans, somewhere along the long arc that leads into Revelation. We are still inside the era that began with the descent of the Holy Spirit.
That is why this year I am giving these twenty-seven weeks over to a careful look at the Spirit. How much do we really know about him. What have we misunderstood when we use words like Spirit-filled and Spirit-empowered. Week by week we are trying to set the foundation back in place.
Today is week four of that journey. The title is this. The Holy Spirit brings God's Word to my mind. The key words for today are these. He brings it back. He keeps me from forgetting.
As always, I will move through the message in the form of five questions.
One. How did I fight the spiritual battle this week?
The first thing I notice when I wake up in the morning is whatever was in my dream the night before. The moment my eyes open, that scene is already there. Now my wife, who sleeps beside me, almost always wakes up and tells me about how she shared the gospel in her dream, or how she was calling out the name. Jesus is the Christ. That is the kind of thing she reports almost every morning.
I am a different story. I rarely wake up feeling refreshed. My dreams are usually about being chased, or being cheated, or running after someone, scenes of restless searching. The last thing your sleeping mind serves up is the first thing you wake into. So my day begins on a foot that is not quite settled, and that unsettled mood often becomes the soundtrack of the morning.
This is where the real question comes in. What time of day is the mind clearest. The morning. So what kind of mood and what kind of posture I bring into that hour shapes everything that follows. That is why every single morning I have a name I call. Jesus is the Christ. Over and over. I do not get out of bed until that word begins to move inside me again.
There is another layer to this. Sometimes my eyes are not even fully open and my head is already racing. What do I need to do today. Whom do I need to meet. Then whom. What has to be done quickly. What about my children. The whole engine starts turning before I have even sat up. And then I jump out of bed and disappear into the work, and somewhere along the way the name Jesus is the Christ never gets called. It is only later, when I hit a wall or feel the strain, that the name finally comes back to me.
I had to take an honest look at this. What I saw was that the central truths of my faith, that Jesus is the Christ, that I am a child of God, that every problem has been finished at the cross, that the devil must leave, that I am to be filled with the Spirit, that I am called to world evangelization, none of these are truly engraved in me. Easily ninety-nine point nine nine percent of what runs through my head first is either get going on the work or whatever was wandering through my last dream.
So at some point I made a decision. I am going to call this name on purpose. Why. Not to feel something, but to keep from forgetting. If we are going to talk about spiritual battle, then for me it has come down to this. Not forgetting that Jesus is the Christ. Making sure that in any situation, that name is the first thing that surfaces. So I keep calling it.
The German missionary and the sandcastle
There was another layer of battle this week. We have sent a missionary to Germany. For about half a day my heart was simply empty. I did not quite know what to do with myself. I was doing things, but inside it was hollow, so I got in the car and drove for a while just to let the air move through me. And the whole time I was calling the name. Jesus is the Christ. But underneath, way down at the bottom, the hollowness kept coming up.
There is something more important here. For ten years I have been quietly building a picture in my mind about this child we have sent into Europe. Through football he would rise from the fourth division to the third, from the third to the second, from the second to the top flight. He would earn well, the media would cover him, people would be impressed, and at that moment of public attention he would step forward and say, I am a man of God, Jesus is the Christ. From that public confession many disciples would be raised up. And of course the people who raised him would suddenly be known too, and the church would be known, and a wave of revival would follow.
That imagination became something more than imagination. It quietly slid into the place where my faith was supposed to live. And it sat there for ten years. If he had been injured along the way, or if the dream had been interrupted, my faith would have collapsed and that would have been the end of it. But because the picture kept holding for ten years, it became invisible to me. So this week, sending him off again, I could see it clearly. I had built an enormous sandcastle. And I had been calling it faith.
The problem with the sandcastle is that it never works out the way I picture it. I am not God. If I were God then of course my picture would come to pass. But I am not God, and yet I was sitting in the seat of God demanding to know why the picture was not coming together. I have known this in my head for a long time, but it has been a slow, painful breaking, layer after layer, year after year. This week I saw my own face in it clearly.
So I went back into the fight. Jesus is the Christ.
You are doing this too. Raising children, studying, building a business, every one of us has a sandcastle of some kind. When the castle stands, we say thank you Lord. When the castle falls, we ask Lord, are you really alive. It is one or the other. I have lived that way myself. And at the bottom of it, who is sitting in the judge's seat. I am. I have made myself God.
That is what we have to lay down. So this week I laid it down. I do not know when the urge to pick it back up will come, but for now I have put it down. I gave that child back to God. The plan that if he succeeds the gospel will spread, that was my plan, not God's. I have thrown the whole thing back to God. Whether he rises or falls, whether things turn out or do not, God has already prepared the most perfect path for his own child. If glory comes through his rising, fine. If glory comes through his falling, fine. The result is not mine to know.
After I let it go, I started calling the name again. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ. That is the backdrop of the deepest spiritual battle I fought this week. And the only way I know to keep from forgetting is to keep calling that name.
Two. What was the most central thing in Scripture this week?
If you ask me which verse holds the whole Bible together, I will keep giving the same answer for as long as I am still preaching. Genesis chapter three, verse fifteen.
We are not whole as human beings. According to Genesis 3 verses one to five, the satan that was outside, the filth that was outside, the sin and death that were outside, all of it came inside us. And the problem is not just that it came in. The problem is that it does not go back out.
The idea that the moment we receive Jesus as Christ everything inside us is suddenly cleaned out is one of the great misunderstandings of our faith. None of it leaves until we die. It does not leave until we walk into heaven. So what does that mean for us? It means we will be in this fight for the whole length of our lives. And the Lord has already given us the name we are to fight with.
Let us confess together. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ.
In Genesis 3:15 the Lord God, knowing exactly what kind of debris had entered the human heart, gave us the name that could deal with it all. The name Jesus is the Christ. A name we cannot lose for good. A name we can keep returning to even when we have forgotten it. Not a name that leaves us stuck in our forgetting, but a name that, when called again, allows God to restore us.
God is not the one who tears you down
There is something I want to address head-on. The God we meet in the Old Testament is not a God who ruins people in order to save them.
I have heard countless testimonies over the years, especially from successful and famous people. They almost always follow the same script. I was running a great business. I had become famous. I was a star. And then suddenly God started tearing me down. And as the speaker tells it, the implication is unmistakable. God broke me until I had no choice but to believe.
Stop and think about what that does to the people listening. They walk away thinking, so that is God. He destroys lives until people surrender. Why would I want to follow a God like that. Instead of being drawn in by what God is genuinely like, they are warned off. The business gets broken. The body gets broken. The person becomes a wreck. And we are supposed to trust this God.
But Scripture is absolutely clear on this point. The one who breaks human beings is the satan. God is not the breaker. The being who has been masquerading as the breaker, the one we keep mistakenly assigning the destruction to, is satan.
Now back to the heart of the matter. In Genesis 3:15 the Lord God gave the human race the covenant of the Messiah. Why? So we would not forget.
A single moment of forgetting changed everything
Before the fall, what were Adam and Eve like? They knew God. They knew his presence. There was no thought of sin inside them at all. But in a single moment, that knowledge slipped away, and they listened to satan instead. From that point on the inner space was effectively one hundred percent occupied by the voice of the satan, with no room left for the voice of the Lord.
So our task is to make room again. We have to let his word back in, because letting it in is how we live. When we call the name Jesus is the Christ, God answers. When we call that name, God grants a measure of wisdom. He grants a measure of understanding. That name is the line we use to speak with God.
How often you call this name, how carefully, how deeply, that is what shapes your life. So that we will not forget, and even when we have forgotten, so that we can rise up again, we have to keep confessing it. Jesus is the Christ.
Three. Briefly explaining today's text in light of Genesis 3:15
Every page of Scripture flows out of Genesis 3:15. The Lord God promised that he would send the seed of the woman, and from that promise everything else moves forward.
What is the Old Testament really recording? It is the history of a small minority of people who held onto that promise, who lived out of the place called Jesus is the Christ, and who walked under the power of God because of it. Those who did not call on the name simply lived under what the world calls destiny and fate. They wrestled with mental affliction, with sickness, with physical breakdown, with spiritual confusion, and then they died and passed into what Scripture calls the second death. That was the pattern of the human life.
Then, finally, the Lord sent the seed of the woman. In the New Testament, in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, he arrives in person. His name is Jesus.
But John's Gospel stands at a slightly different angle from the others. Today's text comes from John 14:26. Who wrote the Gospel of John? John himself. It is the portrait of Jesus rendered through the eyes of John.
The Gospel runs from chapter one to chapter twenty-one, and five whole chapters, from thirteen through seventeen, are devoted to the days just before Jesus' death. Of those five chapters, three of them, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, contain his farewell discourse to his disciples on the very edge of the cross.
And what subject does he choose to weigh on most heavily in that final moment? He talks about the Holy Spirit. When a person knows he is about to die, he speaks of what matters most. Jesus gathered the twelve and spoke to them at length, in detail, about the Spirit.
The disciples did not understand him well that night. They did not grasp it fully. But Jesus said it plainly. I am about to die. I will rise again. But it is not enough that I am here. The Spirit must come. Only then will you really be helped. And when the Spirit comes, everything I have said to you over these three years, every act of power, every miracle, every interpretation of Scripture I have unfolded, the Spirit will bring it all back to your minds.
Let us say it together. He will bring it back.
That is what John 14:26 is saying to us this morning.
Four. What I want to focus on in today's text
Where we have come, weeks one through four
This is now the fourth Sunday since Pentecost, and across these four weeks I have shifted the angle slightly each time.
Week one. Pentecost is proof that Jesus is the Christ. Before the book of Acts, in the Gospels, only the name Jesus appears. From Acts on, the word Spirit is everywhere. The disciples were filled with the Spirit. The Spirit led them. The Spirit produced fruit in them. The Spirit kept showing up in the story. That tells us something about how central he is.
But the Spirit does not float free of context. The very fact that he came tells us who sent him. He did not come on his own. He came because Jesus, seated at the right hand of the Father, asked the Father to send him, as the Father's public endorsement that Jesus truly is the Christ.
So we have to keep the Holy Spirit in his proper company. Jesus as the Christ, the Father, and the Spirit, always three together, never one alone. Think of the rails of a subway track or a train line, two rails running together side by side, never one alone. In the same way, the Spirit always runs alongside the testimony that Jesus is the Christ and alongside the Father. Three together. Always three.
Week two. The Spirit sent by the Christ who lives in the bodies of believers. Two weeks ago we compared the inner life of a person who does not know Christ at all with the inner life of a person who has experienced the Spirit.
Week three. Why the Spirit had to enter the hearts of the disciples. Last week we looked at the inner storm of depression, comparison, and fear, and how the Spirit alone enters that place and does battle there.
And week four, this morning. The Holy Spirit brings God's Word to my mind.
To put it simply, the Spirit is the evidence that Jesus is the Christ, and the Spirit is the one who dwells inside our bodies, inside our thinking. Hold those two anchors, and we can move into today.
A battle over information. Which thought comes first?
The most important word in this message is thought. In the whole of life, the place where the decisive thing happens is in our thinking.
How does thinking work in someone who has never met Jesus? Information enters, and the person acts on it. So the question becomes, what kind of information is coming in?
Since Genesis 3:1-5, when the satan took the territory of the human heart, the basic raw material flowing through human thought has been this. What will I eat. What will I sleep on. What will I wear. Whom will I marry. What will I buy. What will I sell. What will I plant. What house will I build. Practically every thought rising up in our bodies is some version of what is for dinner, what should I wear, how am I going to rest.
I spend several days a week watching very small children, a one-year-old, a three-year-old, an eight-year-old. I watch them closely. I am into my sixties now, plenty of mileage on my own thinking. But a one-year-old is almost a blank slate that has only just begun to grow. And so they are a good test case.
Does the name of God ever rise spontaneously from a one-year-old? It does not. Does the name Jesus the Christ ever come out by itself? It does not. What rises naturally from a newborn human being is just this. Food, sleep, clothes. As the child grows, what they hear at school gets added in. What they hear at the academy. Does the name of Jesus come out of those lessons? No. Does Christ surface in any of that material? No.
So the inputs themselves do not make room for God. It comes down to a battle over information. Which thought gets in first. Which content occupies the seat before another can take it. In the body the seat fills automatically with the things of the world. So we have to deliberately make room for the Word of God to be the first thing that arrives. And for that, we need a name.
Let us call it together. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ.
When we call this name, the impulse of the body to react immediately gets paused for a moment. When we call this name, God uses that pause to let the Spirit bring a word to mind. So how you call this name matters enormously.
By default we forget the Word of God. So the fact that right now you are calling Jesus is the Christ, that you are practicing the meditations of our church, that even a little of that name is moving inside you, what does that prove? It proves that the Holy Spirit is at work inside you in this very moment.
A common misunderstanding about the Spirit
There is a misunderstanding here we need to address. I sat under it for decades myself.
When people hear the word Spirit, what do they picture? They picture fire. A flash from the sky, something thunderous, something powerful arriving on the outside. They take that and call it the descent of the Spirit. And then inside themselves, they wait for that hot surge, and they call only that the Spirit.
But if your insides were running at that fever pitch every day, that would not be spiritual health. That would be pneumonia. That would be a sick person. That is not the picture.
What does the Spirit actually do inside us? He makes the Word of God the first thing that comes to mind. And he leads that Word toward the place called Jesus is the Christ. That is what the Spirit does. He is not the explosion. He is the one who brings back to memory.
Go back to John 14:26 again. Jesus said it directly. When the Spirit comes, everything I said, everything I did, every interpretation of the Word I gave you, he will bring it back to your minds. Once we remember, we can ask the next question, go to the next layer, walk into deeper ground.
The first thing matters most. What we have heard, and which of those things gets remembered first. So whatever it takes, call Jesus is the Christ, so that the Word of God comes back to you, so that the Word of God opens itself up for you.
And one step further. No matter how much of the Word comes back to your mind, if it does not end at Jesus is the Christ, it is going nowhere useful. Even when a single verse comes back to you, it has to land in that name. Only then are you walking in the right direction.
Peter and Paul
Let me set this beside two figures.
After Pentecost there is Peter. The very same Peter who had denied Jesus three times before Acts chapter two. And then we move into Acts 2, and suddenly everything he had heard before begins to make sense to him.
The closest analogy I have for this comes from somewhere unexpected. I used to watch a lot of martial arts films, especially the old Chinese wuxia movies. A familiar scene plays out again and again. The master hands the student a book and tells him to memorize it. The student has no idea what any of it means. He just memorizes. Time passes, the student reaches a certain level, and then in the middle of a fight the verse from the book suddenly surfaces in his mind. He moves according to that verse, and at that moment what he memorized becomes alive. Everything changes.
Acts is the same shape. Jesus said the things we read in John 14:26, but his disciples could not really hold onto it. They heard it without understanding it. Then the Spirit came inside them in Acts 2, and the words they had heard returned to them in full. From that moment on, the disciples are not the same people.
The other figure is Paul. From the moment of his conversion in Acts 9, he writes Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, and on through the letters. And the word he cannot stop using is Spirit. Spirit. Spirit. Why? Because the Spirit of the Christ was alive inside him, and from that interior place everything else in the world began to be interpreted.
So if today you find yourself, even a little, calling out the name. If even a sliver of Scripture comes back to your mind. If the church surfaces in your thoughts. If a word you once heard rises up again. It is because the Holy Spirit is inside you, putting that thought there, present with you right now in whatever measure he chooses.
Five. How will I apply today's message to my own life?
I felt two things sharply this week, almost like points pressed into me.
One. I am genuinely a person who forgets the Word of God.
Two. Almost everything that surfaces in my head is something from the past.
My wife has not been well lately, so I have been taking her around in a wheelchair. Once a day I make sure she gets some exercise. In the mornings we sit together in a café. And as I push her along, and as we sit across from each other with our coffee, I started paying attention to the content of our conversation. Almost all of it was about the past. Back then I did this. So-and-so did that. On and on, a running tour of yesterday.
So I tried to redirect us. Let us talk about right here. About this place. About the people in this café. Let us look at this and pray into this. We managed maybe a sentence or two of that, and by the third or fourth sentence we were back to criticizing somebody, picking apart somebody, telling old stories.
That was what my head produced on its own. The Word of God did not come. But the thing that actually matters is what is in front of us right now, isn't it? If you are sitting in a café drinking coffee, that café is the moment. Notice the coffee. Notice the people. Notice the small world around you. That is where you look for God's plan. That is where you pray.
And yet inside me what was running was, back then it was like this, that person did this, this happened that way. I felt sick of myself. Looking back, the picture became clear. I was not a person living in the present. I was a person tied up in the past, living there as if it were now.
The person who tried to signal me
A small thing happened the day before yesterday. Someone was walking past, and they kept giving me a signal, an opening, a hint that they wanted to talk. I could feel inside me that I was supposed to stop and meet this person. The cue was clearly there. But the cue brushed past me, and I sank straight back into my own past again.
In that instant I understood. If I do not call the name Jesus is the Christ, this is going to get serious. Especially for someone like me past sixty, who gets tied to the past so easily. I saw how severe the problem was.
So I call the name again. Just to come back to my senses.
This week I began applying this directly. Call the name and come back into the present. Call the name and reverse the drift that pulls God's Word out of my mind. This is the name that brings me back to myself. Jesus is the Christ.
Let us say it together. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ.
The thing that matters is what is here. What is in front of me right now. What is unfolding. What is approaching. The next step grows out of how I respond here. But if the present is invisible and my head is only churning the old material, I will miss the person I was supposed to meet. I will miss the thing I was supposed to handle.
Conclusion. The name that pulls us out of the past
This coming week the satan will keep pushing memory after memory at you, pulling you back into the past. In that moment, call the name. Come to your senses. Let God's Word return. Let the Spirit fill your inner space. Let your eyes find the present again. Call the name. Please call it.
Let us say it together once more.
Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the Christ.
I am a child of God. Every problem is finished. Satan, go. Filled with the Spirit. World evangelization.
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